It may well differ between schools, though.
Though having learned French from two very different teachers, I'll say I'm not at all convinced that focusing on the grammar is helpful until people have reached a relatively advanced level.
My first teacher was very formal and went through the grammar in detail from the start. My second, in an intensive course at university, focused on immersion instead - she started speaking French to us almost exclusively from the very first lesson (which included people who had never had French before), and the focus was on speaking, with an insistence that everyone in class participated every lesson. The second course brought those who had never spoken French previously to a conversational level much faster.
My French teacher fully explained the grammar most of which passed me by since, certainly in my case, one doesn't really rationalise their own language in terms of technicalities.
My German teacher just pitched up on day one and spoke nothing but German. Two years later I was absolutely none the wiser. I could quite honestly have been listening to white noise.
That anybody "picks up" a language is something I am amazed by.
The structure meant both that we were forced to try and that the teacher knew at any point how we were doing.
She is an exceptional teacher. If only every teacher were that good, that dedicated.
The really significant upside that I think people tend to gloss over is that my pronunciation is pretty much perfect, because I’d learn to say things by just repeating what I’d heard. On the phone people can’t tell I’m not a native speaker.
Additionally, for really foreign languages (e.g. English vs Chinese) knowing in what order to place words and whether words are needed at all is of great help.
Both parts are needed.
It isn't like you think about grammar forever.
And by the way: I had formal language training, for adults. Immersive, even: I am in the target country, spent 15 hours a week in class with other immigrants, and was taught by a native speaker. Most of the learning was introducing new word groups and practicing speaking and listening. A little bit was grammar, though, for specifically the reason I listed.
I think the step from "slowly doing grammar while I try to understand" to "I'm so good at grammar that I just understand" doesn't work that way.
I was taught English from 6 to 18 in a very traditional, strict, grammar-driven way and learned nothing. All spaniards go through the same type of lessons and very few can understand anything at all after years.
At 18 I stopped any classes or studying but I got satellite TV, English computing magazines and shortly afterwards the Internet and then just learned all the English I needed to get by without much conscious effort.
A few years ago I got interested in Danish and in about 4 months I could read regular novels at a decent pace just from Duolingo, newspapers and subtitled TV series. I probably could do the same with any language just with enough motivation.
When you constantly switch between those languages in terms of grammar, you realize how different those languages are. I didn't realize that in the beginning and I still have a habit of translating sayings from German into English that just don't make any actual sense.
If you really want to learn a language, you need to learn the grammar, even if it isn't any fun.
While adults can learn second languages, very few can just pick up the grammar as they did with their native languages as children. For most adults, if we want to learn how to speak and write a second language with reasonable accuracy, we have to study the grammar explicitly. Practicing in immersive situations also helps a lot, of course.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis
Perhaps it depends on the language you start with and the one you learn but small children seem to pick things up very rapidly by immersion.
It took each of my children roughly six months to learn Norwegian from the age of three when they went to kindergarten. We kept them at home until then to make sure that they would be fluent in English, then sent them to kindergarten where they learned Norwegian without any formal lessons at all, and within a year they were indistinguishable from the natives.
This just isn't true. It might have been true for you, but it isn't true 'in the UK', and most likely you've just forgotten because it wasn't and hasn't been important to you; it's on the national curriculum.
> When you don’t even know formally how your own language is structured, it is very difficult to learn another language.
Absolutely agree with that, and it's worth learning more and revising what you were taught when at school in the UK if you choose to learn another language.
It's also (one reason) why 'Latin is useless' is bollocks. Latin has a more 'complete' grammar than (modern) English, by which I mean that it has more cases, conjugations, etc. that are productive, and which take differing forms. It can be difficult to get your head around two different constructions in a language being learnt if both take the same form in English; they probably don't in Latin.
I've never learnt Latin formally, but I've tried to pick a tiny bit up, and I tend to look to Latin grammar and resources rather than English in my pursuit of Hindi.
But the rest? I don't remember them being taught them at all. I went to school in Northern Ireland starting in 1999, I thought the "national curriculum" covered all of the UK but it turns out NI has its own so that may have something to do with it.
I'm an avid amateur linguist so perhaps I'm letting my own perceptions of what is important colour what I think should be important to other people.
In England, most of these basic concepts are introduced in primary school. These terms are introduced in Year 2 (age 6-7): noun, noun phrase, statement, question, exclamation, command, compound, suffix, adjective, adverb, verb, tense (past, present), apostrophe, comma[1, p66].
How much grammar is taught has changed -- it's more now than it was in the 1990s or 2000s -- but certainly "simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns" have always been taught.
Children who paid no attention in English lessons should get a second opportunity to learn in modern language lessons (e.g. French).
A Danish language school I attended filtered people into "professional" and "non-professional" groups. The "professional" group saved time by assuming students understood "the subjunctive mood…" etc.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
As you've communicated, a major difference between native speakers and non-native speakers is that native speakers usually don't know or care about the grammar of the language they speak. They learn it through a series of dopamine hits they get from successfully understanding or being understood. If people who regularly and naturally use the subjunctive don't know the word "subjunctive" and can barely understand or repeat an explanation given of it, how important could it be to fluency?
I have taught myself Swedish listening to Sveriges Radio, reading and translating news articles and following a series of short Swedish lessons on youtube. I pick up grammar as I go along rather than learn it formally. I don't use flash cards, duolingo or rote memorisation. The key thing is to read, write, listen and pronounce - form sentences and use the language rather than work on memorising vocabulary (that comes naturally).
What works for Swedish might not work for many other languages.
I think most people would be best served learning a language by not learning about any grammar 'rules' at all (maybe some simplified rules of thumb here and there for illustration and anchoring of skills - I'm not saying everyone should have to build their own grammar mental models from scratch through osmosis, but they should be introduced after a basic level of competence with the construct, not up front). As is remarked above - I'm sure this is a convenient way of teaching, because you can just tick off boxes of discrete 'components' ('does my student know the rules to conjugate in this and this past tense? check!), but there is a weak correlation to actually being able to use the language.
I learned most of my language skills in both English and French by listening to rap music, transcribing it, translating into Dutch (my native language), repeating it and mimicking pronunciation etc. If anything, having to learn the grammar rules made the actual language acquisition harder. My best French teacher was one who, after asking in desperation 'how can I get you boys to be interested in learning French?' and me (mockingly) suggesting we analyse some MC Solaar CD's, then actually went out and got some of those, and contacted her Parisien neice to give us some of the backstory on the slang used in them, too.
Then again, I'm bitter about many of the traditional teaching methods and I have no proof my anecdote scales to the general population, so my opinion is worth about as much as... well, something that's pretty worthless I guess...
"They" attempted to teach me both French and German and in both cases I quite literally had no idea what was going on. A* pupil in English and English Literature.
I am sure it is different today but certainly in the '80s and into the '90s you could arrive in senior school with perfect English and no idea why.
The shocker for me was that I'd spent my whole short life up until that point just correctly intuiting all of the weird grammar modifications and then suddenly I couldn't. Any attempt to explain went right over my head as the framework to explain them was just missing.
This is interesting because in India schools do teach grammar and grammatical terms. I thought they copied it from the UK school system. May be UK used to teach grammar before 1947 (when India got independence) and then they stopped teaching it.
The US teaches most terms. It's pretty important to know what prepositions are, and how adjectives and adverbs differ. Lots of more complex topics do come up, but kids don't listen. It's not immediately applicable to their life so it goes in one ear and out the other. Plenty of people say also schools need to teach how to balance a checkbook and teach some basic finance. They do--but kids aren't paying attention, because no 5th grader should be out there balancing checkbooks for quite a few years, and no kid really cares what a "preposition" is either until they're learning another language or trying to improve their writing and suddenly need to dig back into those memory banks.
But people who say to not study grammar usually don't make progress. What's worse is some people say "don't worry. Our language has no grammar." Every language has some basic rules to learn. The problem is some textbooks heavily front load some formal grammar because a lot of adult learning materials are focused on business usage, and they come with the implication that somehow a person is going to go from zero to handling diplomatic meetings in a month.
Japanese textbooks are notoriously bad for emphasizing very formal speech (sometimes even excessively formal speech) before delving into more casual stuff that people will use 90% of the time. Then you meet a person and the grammar you've studied doesn't align with most of what's immediately practical, and it's easy to conclude it "doesn't matter".
Oh, everyone in school will have been taught concepts like past tense and pluralisation.
But often you can apply concepts just fine without having memorised the precise technical term for that concept. You can write just fine without understanding sentence diagrams, as surely as you can lift a box without understanding free body force diagrams.
I’m not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English. No one knows grammatical terms, like preposition, person, the name of tenses, the subjunctive, or even simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns.
When you don’t even know formally how your own language is structured, it is very difficult to learn another language.
For example, my mother (native French-speaker) gives private French lessons. She finds that instead of saying “ok today we’re going to learn about the subjunctive mood, the root is the third person plural of the indicative mood of the verb with the following endings”, she spends most of her time having to explain what those terms mean.
I realise that there may be other ways that are less formal to learn languages, but at the end of the day, grammars follow rules, and if you don’t even understand the rule book in your own language you’re already at a huge disadvantage in my opinion.
All these online articles claiming “don’t worry about grammar, that will come later” are missing out on what I think is the most important tool in language learning.